


The Form to Wake

by Blazinghand



Category: Kara no Kyoukai | The Garden of Sinners
Genre: Body Horror, Death, Gen, Gift Fic, Maybe not death actually, Philosophy, Puppets, Yuletide 2016, form, wake - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 09:51:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8886319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blazinghand/pseuds/Blazinghand
Summary: The Ogawa apartment complex lies in ruin, its spiral of falsehood and truth destroyed along with everything else. In the aftermath, Aozaki Touko contemplates the truth and falsehood she embodied to survive.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lightofthewind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightofthewind/gifts).



_What does it mean to create a puppet?_

“This body is at its limit,” Araya Souren rasped, and he was right. Even were he not impaled on Shiki's blade, Touko judged, he would be too weak and injured to move after the fall. The wording, though, dug at her. It was not the sort of phrase a man with only one body would say, and Souren—she knew Souren.

“Are you going to start again?” she asked, her tone a study in carelessness. She had to know.

“I didn't make any spare bodies,” he admitted, his form diminishing, vanishing into the air by pieces.

She paused to take a drag on her cigarette. No more bodies meant no more Souren.

 _What does it mean to create a_ perfect _puppet?_

For Aozaki Touko, it meant to create _form._ Concepts had power in the world, and the concept of _form_ had more than most. Touko did not allow herself to know any difference between an artificial body that perfectly took the _form_ of _human_ and a natural one if they fit the same parameters. A _form_ took on more than just the appearance of sameness, or a facade of sameness. It went beyond simply replicating the look and feel of a _form_ , beyond simply replicating its range of motion or its physical parameters. It went beyond replicating the individual atoms of a _form_. No, the _form_ itself must be captured—down to its essence, down to the root of what it meant to be that and nothing else.

Shiki’s arm, for example, was a perfect replication of the _form_ a human arm. It was more than just the muscles and ligaments and bones and nails and skin and pores and all the connections in between those parts. More than flesh, bloods, veins, nerves—more than any of that, it held the idea of _arm_. Without this, it would only be meat and magecraft, a facsimile of an arm that might act like one, perhaps, but would never truly be an arm. Touko had worked hard, tirelessly, to make sure the arm had the _form_ of arm, and her always work paid off, both with Shiki’s arm and in her other projects.

Looking down at her own body, Touko couldn’t help but feel a moment of panic. For a moment, she nearly doubted that _this_ was Aozaki Touko, not some facsimile. Her own internal experience, her own consciousness, told her she was herself. Everything she knew said that this continued thought-pattern was continuous with the last one, and therefore her own perception was true. She was not a puppet with the appearance of Aozaki Touko, risen in the wake of the woman who had died at the Ogawa apartment complex. No, she was Aozaki Touko proper, and no conscious experience could convince her otherwise.

To begin: A wake is a path in water, soon forgotten, left by one who passes. In this sense, if Touko was in her own wake, then she had nothing to fear. After all, whatever ripples she’d left before as she moved through life were already gone: water has no capacity for this category of remembrance. In a pond, perhaps, one might leave ripples from a thrown stone, though even those interfere and turn into uncountable turbulent interlocking rings, then bumps, then stillness once more. In a river, or the ocean, ripples from a wake faded more quickly, and were forgotten; so they ought not to remember her wake when she returned. In the world’s size and turbulence, it was this amnesia that opened the door for her reentry. This was known to her. In England, she hadn’t had much time for the study of literature, but she remembered the epitaph of John Keats, as anonymous as wind and ironically enduring: “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.” And were it so, it would be easy to pick up the pen again.

And more: A wake is a remembrance of one who has died, both a gathering and a vigil. In this sense, were Touko in her own wake, she would be already lost, and would be no longer who she once was. A memory of her own death would enforce the sense of wrongness again, to bring her back to the cognitive dissonance that reminded her: “you are not right” and that urged her to acknowledge: “you are not true” despite her form. The world might sense that something was not right, that those who lie still yet walk, that her head was taken by Cornelius, and that Touko, such as she was, ought not to exist. In such a world, no amount of water could wash away the wrongness of this reincarnation—just, incarnation, for perhaps this was always who she has been, and was just awaiting a chance to wake.

Finally: To wake is to arise from slumber and regain consciousness. And no matter what Aozaki Touko did, this would remain true. Now that the Ogawa apartment complex was destroyed and the rubble strewn about, there was no one to claim that she wasn’t who she always had been. There was no sense of replacement, that she was taking the place of another. There was no sense of displacement, that another must be pushed out. No, Aozaki Tworthouko belonged here, and her existence was not a lie.

And yet, she couldn’t help but think—

No, she couldn’t help but wonder—

“Araya, what do you seek?” The words were out of her mouth before she even realized she might say them.

“True wisdom,” he said, his voice weak.

“Araya, where do you seek it?” she asked, like a poem, like an ode, like a dirge—for that was what this was, now.

“Only within myself,” he intoned, his voice weaker.

“Araya, where are you trying to reach?” she asked, and it was all but done.

“That's obvious. The end of this paradox spiral of the world.” And he was gone, like so many bittersweet memories of school days.

The spiral of the Ogawa apartment complex, she knew, offered two truths, two realities to those who were in it. In one reality, the reality of the unrotated elevator, the apartment opened upon the rooms as they were lived in. Enjou Tomoe experienced this, in his confusion and his horror. The sense of _same_ was spoofed by a twist in the nature of the “form” the apartment. When you walk up a spiral staircase, of course, you can only tell how far rotated you are around from an external window. So in a spiraled apartment, the door might open to the true apartment with Tomoe’s dead parents, or a false one with puppets made true by Souren’s ambitions and magecraft.

And what is the truth, when lies can be made true? What is a _form_ , when a puppet made to fit it cannot be distinguished from a body continuous with what came before?

The blade fell to the ground, for Souren was no more.

Souren, killed by Shiki who could cut through any barrier.

Souren, whose life was a search for the end of reality.

Souren, who would have torn this world apart, seen the end of all things, because humanity could displease him.

Souren, Souren, Souren.

Perhaps, had they not in those moments been enemies, Touko might have liked to know what Souren thought of the truth of the scenes housed within his body-that-was-an-apartment complex. When the door opened to an apartment, be it true or false, a form had to be shown. In life, the same held true: a form must be shown. For most, there was no spiral to select between a truth and a falsehood, and the form was always what was shown. Either you “woke” or you did not, depending on the underlying truths. Touko had started at the conclusion and worked backwards. She chose the outcome of _waking_ and took a _form_ that enabled it. Did she twist, like Souren’s complex did, to show a lie she wanted to make true? Or was her _wake_ the truth, now?

As she took another drag, Aozaki Touko thought of her form, and her wakefulness. In the aftermath of the building’s collapse, the city was oddly silent, and for a moment, the trees were her only companions in the night air. Then, snow fell, and Kokutou stirred. Touko breathed out, smoke rising against the falling snow. Feeling the burn of tobacco in new lungs, she paused and wondered, in that moment of stillness.

 _I am awake_ , she thought.

 _I hope_.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for lightofthewind for Yuletide 2016. I hope you enjoyed it—it's a little out of my usual comfort zone. Aozaki Touko's philosophical musings and complex thoughts on life and death always fascinated me about the series. I hope I did her justice. Happy Yuletide!
> 
> Thanks, (redacted until author reveal), for being the coolest beta.


End file.
